Is this a widespread problem in software-related communities? I'm genuinely asking, because if it is maybe I am just not aware of it, but for example in the open-source projects I have been involved with the conversations tend to be extremely focused on the subject matter, and I'm not even aware of the race or gender of the people I'm conversing with.
20 years back (in Debian) there was some banter on the mailing lists, but never of that nature. It was mainly jokes about women. The community was primarily of young males, and that did stop as more women got involved. However, I should state for completeness that none of it was anything that anyone should have been banned over; sometimes a joke was just a joke, before humour was effectively outlawed lest anyone get even slightly offended.
The laziest of Google searches quickly found people being racist on GitHub (... to a GitHub employee! With their own, non anonymous accounts!): https://www.tinykat.cafe/on-all-that-fuckery
(This incident also made it to hn iirc, but maybe you didn't read it that day)
Seems like a very generous reading of what the person I'm specifically responding to said
If you are a woman or black or ... you will very likely experience sexism or racism. You will probably also see more, because you are used to identifying it.
If you say "a third [1] of the people in this group experience a bad thing" I would say that's pretty wide-spread.
The OP was specifically saying "it's not widespread, I've never seen it" [2]
I'm not trying to claim there's a nefarious subtext. I'm not saying the op is sexist or racist. I'm just trying to point out that a lot of people experience this, and one of the stated goals of CoCs in open source or at conferences is to help combat it. I think that's a good thing, and while you or perhaps others have pointed out that a community could combat such negative behavior without a CoC, the CoC does give some indication of how such behavior will be dealt with (before I join the community/attend the conference), which can increase my confidence recommending a conference or increase someone else's confidence attending (or participating in an open source community etc)
[1] https://psmag.com/news/sexism-in-the-tech-industry
[2] not a real quote so please correct me if it's way off, I'm being lazy
Also, I know they were referring to open source - maybe they've seen workplace sexism etc and were specifically excluding that. In that case I'm definitely misquoting and apologize
It's just hard to imagine how racism or sexism would enter into to a community like this because the race and sex of the participants is not known, and you're not even discussing races or genders at all, heck you're generally not discussing people at all.
It happens. People leave tech communities because of it. I don't know what else to tell you. I've provided citations to this effect in a bunch of other comments.
It's important to note, though, that people can do or say racist or sexist things without targeting it at someone. That would still impact someone's decision to stay in the community, even if the person who said it didn't mean to offend them.
However, they aren't. They require moderation because people are rude even when not anonymous.
Here's a quote from the vscode repo moderators:
> We deleted a handful of comments which we deemed too offensive to leave as-is (foul language, racist remarks, etc.). We also deleted a few issues that were overwhelmingly offensive. Unfortunately, that resulted in some non-offensive comments within those issues being deleted as well.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87440
Surely you can't continue to claim that open source communities do not suffer from such issues, now, right?
> a way to assure newcomers that your project wasn't going to allow racist trolling on the mailing list
This is what seems a bit funny to me, because I would take it for granted that racist remarks would not be tolerated as a matter of course. It doesn't seem to me that you need a CoC to enforce this.
And I would repeat that in my personal experience, having been involved with OSS discussions for over 10 years, I have never personally encountered this.
What it does is sets expectations. It sets expectations for everyone involved in any interactions. In general, this should give you confidence that there will be some moderation or recourse if you experience rude behavior. That may allow some people who have been burned by ruder communities to be willing to give yours a try.
https://thephd.github.io/the-community#
[1] if you think this is "just a c++ problem" you're going to be very disappointed
Background:
The boost community has managed to lose a large number of very technically proficient people who were tired of dealing with racism/sexism
JeanHeyd came to prominence a few years ago with some stellar open source libraries and gave some pretty good conference talks & joined the c++ committee.
Throughout his continued work in the c++ community, he ran into a lot of... unnecessary, non-technical feedback.
At some point, he got fed up with it all and created this.
Within the c++ community there are people who are known to be particularly toxic, fwiw, and some of this is calling them out specifically.
I think everyone who has attended a committee meeting knows who/what he is talking about.
There's also an additional bit, where he managed a discord server for one of his open source projects. When discussing Black Is Tech, he got racist pushback.
Hopefully this helps add a little bit of context. I don't think it's too important to understand the details. The tl;dr is that an extraordinary developer, speaker, committee member left the community because he found it to be hostile
That's a fact, and it's one engineers should be reckoning with. Your actions matter.
The implication being that every project without an established code of conduct is awash with racism?
Exhausting vigilance about conspiracies indeed.
Problems such as a plague of racist jokes aren't omnipresent, but they show up often enough in the world that a little signpost at the front door about expectations can help with first impressions and understanding the community.
The problem is the weaponization against random people for obscure reasons. The blog poster here didn't make a presentation full of racist jokes, it's not even clear what they did.
Lawful evil anti-social people exist in the world, we shouldn't let them bully people just because they're waving a rainbow flag while doing so.
Fun straw man though
Bay leaves work their magic in stews, especially beans. Not much else. (I absolute hate licorice btw).
On the other hand, I had seen americans before to mistake bay leaves and cherry laurel. Specially when trying to harvest leaves in gardens. Don't do that. They look similar but cherry laurel contains cyanide.
My take is that the problem with this code of conduct was that it was dumb. I want to recommend to you the degree to which it is easy and relaxing to just acknowledge that and move on, maybe with a note or two about what not to do in any code of conduct you write. It seems --- I could be wrong, I started today confidently wrong about bay leaves --- like the alternative is an exhausting vigilance about conspiracies to control and persecute. Even if you're right, nobody is going to believe you, so what's the point in letting your pulse quicken?